The top 8 headlines you might have missed / Haaretz Newsline November 12

From Israel's large wave of tenders to construct some 20,000 housing units in the West Bank to the recommendation of security officials to halt the distribution of gas masks to civilians, Haaretz brings you the top 8 headlines you might have missed.

The Housing Ministry has issued a tender to hire an architect to plan the construction of 1,200 housing units in the E1 area, which links Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim in the West Bank, as part of a larger wave of tenders to construct some 20,000 housing units in the West Bank at a cost of NIS 45 million.

Relations between Israel and the U.S. are crucial to Israel's ability to maneuver in the international arena, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday, in attempt to play down the public confrontation between the two countries.

Illegal African migrants currently jailed in the Saharonim detention facility will be the first to move to a planned open detention center at Sadot, an Interior Ministry official told the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee on Monday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif hit back at U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry late on Tuesday and blamed divisions between Western powers for the failure of talks over Tehran's disputed nuclear program in Geneva last week.

Security officials are expected to recommend to the cabinet soon that the manufacture and distribution of gas masks to civilians be halted, in light of Syria’s compliance with the international demand to dispose of its chemical weapons.

Sitting among the first-graders in an otherwise ordinary Hebrew lesson at Kehila - the Democratic School, in south Tel Aviv is the Eritrean school janitor, Angosom Solomon, 28. He is an asylum seeker who fled the harsh military dictatorship in Eritrea. He had been nurse a on a military base there, but after a year in the army he fled, first to Ethiopia and later to Israel.

A bill seeking to abolish the practice of having two chief rabbis of Israel, an Ashkenazi one and a Sephardi one, was jointly proposed Monday by the Hatnuah and Habayit Hayehudi parties.